Digital lighting technologies, i.e. illumination based on semiconductor light sources, such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), offer a viable alternative to traditional fluorescent, HID, and incandescent lamps. Functional advantages and benefits of LEDs include high energy conversion and optical efficiency, durability, lower operating costs, and many others. Recent advances in LED technology have provided efficient and robust full-spectrum lighting sources that enable a variety of lighting effects in many applications.
Many users are not sufficiently knowledgeable regarding which lighting products may best suit their needs and preferences. For example, functional and atmospheric lighting quality and intensity, lifetime, uniformity, energy saving features, et cetera, are difficult to translate to the budget, tastes and lighting environment of a user. This is particularly applicable when considering LED-based products, since the range of options enabled by the technology becomes daunting, including, for example, design freedom, color and color temperature options, and intelligent control. To alleviate these difficulties, an increasing amount of advice is being offered online to help users in their product selection process, but these methods are cumbersome and intrusive.
In line with this trend, it is likely the cost of near field communication (NFC) technology will continue to decrease over the next five years, mainly due to the advent of its adoption by the mobile phone industry. Such technology, in particular, the use of NFC type-1/2 tags, currently cost about five cents per tag. Reduced price NFC tags offer opportunities for low cost data storage and communication that may have previously made such features impractical for some types of products.
Some known lighting fixtures include a multi-tap capacitor sensor to record lumen output measurements at the ballast coil. These lighting fixtures have internal memory for storing sensor data and data related to, for example, an operating schedule and various operational parameters. This stored data may be accessed while the lighting fixture is in operation to calculate power consumption and to adjust operating parameters, for example, to maintain a desired illumination level over the life of the lighting fixture.
Other known lighting fixtures include internal memory for storing operational data and information identifying the lighting fixture. These parameters may be externally accessed from the in-service lighting fixture, for example, by a wireless connection, to identify a lighting fixture operating past peak efficiency. Operation of the lighting fixtures may be prevented if one or more of the stored parameters exceeds a reference value. In both of these prior art examples, the stored information is only accessible from an operational lighting fixture and used for controlling its operation.
Thus, there is a need in the art to overcome the problem of insufficient guidance regarding replacement lighting products that are tailored to user needs and preferences, without needing to rely on complex interactions for the user and the retail shop assistant or e-commerce stores, which is generally unfeasible in most retail environments or online shopping options due to the costs and time incurred to do this effectively.